1.7.3-Aphraseremains
Brick!Club 1.7.3 A tempest in a human skull Hugo doesn’t actually try to pretend anyone could have read this far and not know by now that Madeleine is Jean Valjean – it’s very ‘yes, you have had all the clues, I assume you have already realized, because how could you not, I’m just confirming it for you before we dive into his psyche again.’ I really like that Valjean explicitly has those two goals: to be saintly and help people, sure, but also to stay out of prison. And Hugo points out all the ways Valjean has prioritized helping others over protecting himself so far – but this is still an agonizing decision for him and it’s understandably very difficult for him to work around to what he knows to be his moral duty. “He perceived that, extraordinary and critical though it situation was, he was nevertheless entirely master of it”, and that just makes it harder. What he does here is entirely his decision: if he was in a situation where inaction would be what led to his rearrest, letting that happen would be simple, if unpleasant. But he has to actively work against his own self-interest – if he does nothing he will be completely safe and no one will ever know except himself, and yet he knows that he can’t justify that inaction – though he tries – and that it would be the same as actively condemning Champmathieu. “To do nothing, was in fact to do everything: it was to descend to the most abject depths of criminal hypocrisy and cowardice.” That’s such a great line, both in this specific context and in the larger moral framework of the novel: inaction is action, it is tacit endorsement of what is happening, of the status quo, and it is inexcusable. (And we see various permutations of this idea throughout the novel: the townsfolk of Montfermeil gossiping about Cosette but not helping this abused child, people’s indifference to Fantine’s plight, the indifference caused by cynicism, etc.You can’t just stand by and not do anything and act like that’s a neutral action, because it isn’t.) And the fact that he tries to excuse not doing anything by saying this is the will of God – and then he says, not that God must intend for him to give himself up or something like that, but simply that he cannot “let God have his way”, that this is “blunder on the part of destiny and men” mine. And then he realizes that giving himself up will have terrible consequences for the people of Montreuil-sur-Mer. There really is no good option here, but even so, all his reasoning for not doing anything is still bound up in his desperate desire to not have to give himself up. He undermines his own reasonable arguments with his need to justify it by saying that Champmathieu probably deserves to go to prison anyway. But he never really reaches a satisfactory conclusion with regards to the problem of the effect of this on the people relying on him, because there isn’t one. Also I love the paragraph where Hugo just stops and tells us that Valjean’s talking to himself, inside his own head, just in case we were confused. But it also contains the great line “The realities of the soul are none the less real for being invisible and impalpable.” Which of course goes with the whole gorgeous bit at the beginning of this chapter about the “infinite space” of the interiority of a person. And then he burns his prison things and tries to burn the candlesticks, and a voice (his conscience, I presume) starts telling him off, and I don’t know what to say about any of that, but man this chapter is excellent. His situation is so awful and all options are terrible, and yet he had no moral option but to give himself up and condemn himself, to “become a saint by going back to hell”, and he keeps having to talk himself into it over and over again. Also, I love the comparisons to Jesus, and by love I mean they make me laugh a lot. Hugo is such a subtle writer.